Submission should provide an explanation of the changes in clear form, explain the motivation for change, the changes made, and the testing carried out to verify the submission.

Submissions should be made against the latest version in CVS, or the last public release. The base version should be clearly stated.

Please do not use tabs and indent with 4 spaces.

Submissions will be rejected:

Patches or email copy and paste submissions are not accepted and will be ignored until full files are submitted.

Patches against old versions.

Copyright law and Copyright assignment

We are committed to keeping the OpenSceneGraph source code as an open source resources for all, Copyright Law is the instrument that ensures this. When you write code, even a small code submission, the code that you type is under your personal copyright. If you modify other copyrighted works (such as the OpenSceneGraph) then you can retain copyright to your changes, but must honor the original license of the copyrighted work that you modified, in the context of the OpenSceneGraph these means the OpenSceneGraph Public License (OSGPL), so you must republish the work with modifications under the OSGPL, or loose your rights to distribute those combined works. You don't loose the copyright right to your own modifications though, and even when merged with the OpenSceneGraph, those rights are maintained by default, while the rights for collective work is then under collective copyright of the various contributors to that work. The OSGPL like almost all open source license permits this, and is how many open source project work, even ones as large as the linux kernal.

Being a copyright owner also comes with responsibilities - you need to keep engaged with the rest of the collective copyright owners to help make future decisions about licensing. Something that contributors can do is to assign their copyright over to the project leads, and if you are just making small changes to the OpenSeneGraph such as bug fixes and small feature additions we'd recommend this just to keep the number of copyright owners and effective guardians of the source code down to manageable number.

We haven't yet set up a system to formalize Copyright Assignment, so please on your contributions whether you wish to assign copyrights, or retain them. All submissions are checked in with the contributors name so are traceable through the version control system.

Notes for users of Mozilla/Thunderbird users:

Mozilla/Thunderbird has a long standing bug related to declaring that text files should be inline even when attached as attachments. This problem may not be apparent when sending between Thunderbird users, however, between other mail tools such text file attachments are inlined if they are compliant to specs, gmail is such tool. Users of Thunderbird should amend their preferences to not inline text files, or send text files as gzipped or zipped archives to get around this bug.